Music in a Strange Land

Check it out peeps. A fine and tempting review of Joseph Horowitz'  Artists in Exile: How refugees from twentieth-century war and revolution transformed the American performing art. 

Horowitz provides biographical sketches for them all, each sketch studded with quotable illustrations. (Otto Preminger, hearing a group of his fellow émigrés speaking Hungarian, said, “Don’t you people know you’re in Hollywood? Speak German.”) The result is a rich assembly, an unmasked ball teeming with famous names, but you always have to remember – and our author, to his credit, never forgets – that in too many cases their attendance was compulsory, a fact which can lend a sad note to the glamour.

This looks to be an excellent read. Read the rest of Clive James excellent review here.